Come back, all is forgiven

Blame it on Anish Kapoor. The Bombay boy left his Dosco buddies to escape to the Ol' Blighty where he made a career out of fashioning reflecting surfaces in the shape of saucers, or beanies, and made so much money out of it that he found himself living in London's millionaire's row and rubbing shoulders with the Queen.

The Indian lad had made good and the world knew it, with orders for installations pouring in from cities around the world. But what was that worth if no one back home-India, still being home-paid heed? Even Lakshmi Mittal, shelling out a handsome Rs 115 crore, wanted the egoistically named Arcellor Mittal Orbit positioned not in New Delhi ahead of the Commonwealth Games but in London ahead of the 2012 Olympics.

But an Indian's got to do what he's got to do, so Kapoor, forty years after he'd renounced ties with the home country, came to renew them to a tumultuous debut in New Delhi and Mumbai. Already, in 2009, he'd created a buzz at the India Art Summit with two works, one of which was snapped up by Shiv Nadar's art-collecting wife Kiran to become the focal point of her Kiran Nadar Museum of Modern Art. But this time, the salt-haired artist came with his works in tow.

The buzz in India now, therefore, is around sculpture, something Indian collectors are normally wary of, with city authorities wondering how they can use these instead of the de rigueur Mahatma Gandhi or ubiquitous Mayawati statues to signal that theirs too are world cities.

Does Anish Kapoor's return mark the return of India's artists in exile? Apparently so. For hotfooting right behind him, to take up residence in New Delhi, is France's living legend and Indian artist S.H. Raza. He left in 1949 to first study, then marry and make a career for himself in Paris and Gorbio. The gentle, soft-spoken artist has been a winter migrant to the land of his birth. Increasingly frail now, he's paid his taxes and done with France for the care and support-and market-that India offers him. In the capital, he will dedicate himself not only to painting, but also to Raza Foundation which supports the arts, including literature.

Raza was one of the founding members of the Progressive Artists' Group in 1947, and among the three (with F.N. Souza and S.K. Bakre) who left for Europe soon after. At the time of his departure, he was known as a landscape artist though he was veering towards abstraction even then. He was celebrated through the 60s and 70s for this but, increasingly uneasy about his loss of heritage, returned to India for inspiration.

He found it finally in the bindu-the dot that his teacher had marked for him on a blackboard, urging him to focus, or meditate. That bindu became the starting point for an engagement with nature in a geometric body of works that has remained his leitmotif since, and which some have labelled as having its roots in tantric art (though Raza vehemently contests this).

The artist returns at a time when prices for the masters are shooting up. Raza himself holds the record for Saurashtra, a painting that was bought for a humungous Rs 16.4 crore by Kiran Nadar at an auction.

Raza may have returned to settle in India, but many others are already here in spirit. Leading among these is Souza, the artist who made his home first in London and later in New York but died in Mumbai in 2002. Even though his shows were sellouts in the 50s and 60s, Souza was not enamoured of London; perhaps because his neighbours complained constantly of his peccadilloes and rooted through his trash for drawings they claimed were pornographic.

In New York, soon after his arrival, he found a way to dissolve the patina of colours from printed newspaper supplements and glossy magazines and, over these, painted furious images, creating a new and exciting medium referred to as chemical alterations. In recent times, these are being compared with his works in oil.

Though Souza kept returning to India from the 80s onwards for exhibitions, and his most expensive painting Birth was bought at an auction by Tina Ambani for Rs 10.5 crore, it is only now that he is becoming known as perhaps India's most outrageously experimental artist who's often compared with Pablo Picasso.

Avinash Chandra was one of Souza's fellow Indian artists in New York. Known earlier only among a select body of serious collectors, it is now that Chandra is being recognised in the country of his birth. Like Souza in some respects, his 'doodling' resulted in a surreal world of images of people-nudes, too-that energised his canvases. They are very 60s and 70s in their incandescent, hallucinogenic experience, something that was considered 'wild' in India where such art had almost no moorings.

Chandra's recent resuscitation alongside that of two other artists-inexile, V. Vishwanadhan in Paris and Sohan Qadri in Denmark, has marked their renewed popularity in India. Qadri, who is better known in Copenhagen as a yoga instructor-or, better still, as a promoter of nude yoga -has a huge body of works that resonate with tantric energy and electric colours. Now old, Qadri has begun to be discovered in India. This year should mark the beginning of his resurrection in the land which was at the root of his inspiration. Vishwanadhan was exhibited here with some success a few years ago, but this year marks his return to the galleries.

The big question, when it comes to artists-in-exile, revolves around the return of M.F. Husain. Will he make it to the India Art Summit this January? Or at any time this year? The artist who has been living in London, Dubai and Oman, the last with a valid Qatari citizenship, has said often enough that he would like to come back to India, from where he fled because of a number of obscenity cases filed against him. The cases have not been quashed, but Husain's return is imminent. The artist, whose image is larger than life, is unlikely to choose to live out the last years in an exile not entirely of his choosing. Here's to hoping 2011 will be the year of his comeback.

Summing it up

For Rs 1 crore, Kiran Nadar snatched up a steel edition by Anish Kapoor at India Art Summit 2009, but his installations-more architecture than sculpture, really-can command hundreds of crores. Remember, M.F. Husain too did a 100-crore deal a couple of years ago, but it was not realised. Husain isn't top of the marquee though; S.H. Raza rules that roost. Average Raza prices range from Rs 40 lakh to Rs 2.5 crore, Husain goes for Rs 15 lakh to Rs 2 crore while an F.N. Souza costs between Rs 30 lakh and Rs 2 crore (with drawings starting at around Rs 1.5 lakh). Sohan Qadri and V. Vishwanadhan? Get them between Rs 3 lakh and Rs 6 lakh.

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